The Megadrive is dusted and plugged so I played QuackShot (starring Donald Duck!). This is a treasure hunting platformer, with Donald disguised as Indiana Jones (using a gun firing plungers in lieu of a whip). The structure of the game is very neat. There are levels all around the world (only 4 available at first) and each level is in two parts, with the 2nd part usually requiring a story item or a new ability to access. So you fly around the globe trying to find what could open that pyramid or where is the key to enter the belly of a viking ship and since you can fly off and land at mid-way points, your progress is never lost even if you went to the wrong place.
As several other of these Disney/Sega games on Genesis/Megadrive the game is extremely beautiful for a game on that system (there are a lot of nice backgrounds, neat parallax scrollings and almost none of the ugly dithering often used to try and artificially expend the limited palette). Sadly, being on the Sega 16bit also mean you have to deal with its supremely garbage controller. With three buttons in line, A being dash, B being shot and C being jump, you often find yourself trying to press both A and C at the same time, which means an annoying claw grip, or putting your controller on your leg and use the buttons like on an arcade cabinet. The buttons themselves are also a bit dubious, considering how far and how hard you need to press them for it to register, but that's only minor annoyance when compared to the D-Pad. It's mushy nature makes it way harder than it should to hit up or down without getting a little left or right. In Quackshot that means making it extra hard to shoot up or to duck (!), which is needed to slide. In all fairness, the age of the controllers do not help and after switching to a less used controller things were a good deal better, but still far from perfect.
Anyway, not very hard, not very long, not super creative levels, but an enjoyable romp (once the controller is tamed).
I never got the chance to play Quackshot growing up but I always wanted to. Looked like a pretty good game! Never played Maui Mallard, either, which also looked decent.
Reading stuff on the internet is very dangerous as it makes you discover and play the strangest games... so I end up playing and beating The Fool's Errand a 1987 adventure/puzzle game for... Macintosh! In all its black and white glory!
It's especially notable for its structure: the game is a long text describing the journey of a Fool in a strange land divided in 60ish sections. Most section have a puzzle you can play to unlock new sections of the text and each time you reach a new section you get a new piece of the map of the land. Reconstructing the map is a meta-puzzle and when you are done with it, this unlocks a bunch of other meta-puzzle that use clues dispersed in the text (the clues themselves are not overly hard to find as they are highlighted, but figuring which is for what puzzle is trickier), with all these puzzle helping you to solve the super overarching puzzle.
This is pretty brilliant, but the actual nature of the puzzles is not that exciting. The lion's share consists of word games such as anagrams, basic ciphers, magic squares and hidden words. You also get some actual puzzles (some images, some with letters), some that are a bit more original like letter manipulation puzzles (you have buttons that affect a string of characters and you have to find out in what order to press them to get an actual sentence instead of a jumbled mess), image manipulation puzzles and then it leaves a dozen of original puzzles that go from the silly to the weird.
Still, even with each part being not that exciting, the synergy between the lighthearted fairy-tale, the illustrations and the puzzles works very well with all the thematic, narrative and mechanical links between them all. In the end you feel you have been part of some pretty satisfying grand adventure. I did not find the game to be extremely hard, though I had to use a good deal of pen & paper work and a tiny bit of help from an anagram solver and an online thesaurus for a couple puzzles.
PS: the one guy that made the game distributes it for free on his website, neatly packaged in a Mac emulator.
PPS: The game was originally on three disks, with one being solely for the intro and the ending. Those are surprisingly neat (for the time and hardware) with some nice full screen illustrations.
Thanks for the kind words and likes guys. I need the support because that Cliff Johnson fellow packaged several of his games in that neat emulator thingy... so I played through 3 in Three.
The game structure is basically the same except just about everything turned sour. All of the fairytale charm of the Fool's Errand, its fantasy setting and its shadow theater illustrations are gone. The story becomes the unappealing adventure of an integer (3) travelling in the belly of a computer that went bust when used to make an all important quarterly report (yay?)... the text-based narration is replaced by little animations with text balloons in the ugliest crappy shareware visuals imaginable (color: not always your friend!). To make matters worse, you get some super annoying 'boing!' sounds for every speech bubble and you have to painfully click through dialogs that mostly consist of lame puns and word plays. Slightly amusing at first, but it gets very old very fast!
To make matters worse, the puzzles are also significantly more tedious than in the Fool's Errand. Trying to find 3 matching symbols in a constantly jumbling 10 by 10 grid is not my idea of fun! Many of the puzzles also have intricate rules that make it very difficult to wrap your head around them and work a solution you can then cleanly execute, so you often semi-randomly stumble through them until you reach the solution. That's not very satisfying. You also have quizzes of sorts with riddles around word plays or with sayings you need to find with just their consonants... those are pretty fun but.... I swear there must be like 50 questions in those quizzes: they massively overstay their welcome.
Because I am a sucker I still spent the hours to finish the whole thing. It is pretty crazy the planing that must take place to design such a game to have riddles whose answers are clues for other riddles whose answers must fit in a kind of crossword grid... There is a little cheating here and there with decoding machines (functionally allowing the designer to turn any word into any other word of the same length, making things a lot easier on himself), but also some mind boggling stuff design-wise. The neat puzzles are few and far between and sadly the grand finale is not one of those. It is a super annoying serie of word puzzles with some wild letters that move around... let's just say I am glad emulators can be paused.
Apparently this was MacUser's 1990 Game of the Year and Games Magazine's 1990 Puzzle Game of the Year. Well... Then I guess it sucked to have a Mac back then!
PS: I started playing the 3rd game in the pack: At the Carnival... why?
So... At the Carnival ended up being pretty interesting. It's the same type of puzzles than in the other games (none as maddening as in 3 in Three though) and there is also a meta-puzzle (though it is absolutely trivial), but it does something the other two games do not: use the puzzles to actually say something.
The game is inspired by the jobs Cliff Johnson had in carnivals during his youth, so it is fueled by bittersweet memories and the behind the curtain looks he had of it all. Some of it is conveyed directly through humorous situations and quotes, but some of it is conveyed through the puzzles. In many word puzzles, the words themselves are just building blocks, sets of characters that are legal by virtue of rules that exist outside the confine of the game: language. But words also have a meaning, and At the Carnival makes ample use of that. For instance, in a "hidden word" puzzle where you scurry through a grid of character to find flavors of ice-cream, you will find vanilla and chocolate, but also crunchy cockroach, so suddenly the puzzle is more than a puzzle it is also a humorous commentary. Further than that, the design of the puzzle can also convey meaning: the giant burger stand puzzle is a seemingly never ending serie of magic squares that give you a lot more than your fill! These two ideas collide in "hidden word" puzzles for the first-aid tent (with dozens of conditions ranging from the benign to the absurd) and the lost-and-found stand (a cornucopia of wtf).
This game shows that game design is really a muti-faceted activity. You can make a puzzle that is mechanically sound/complex/original (almost none of that here!), but you can also make a puzzle that evokes more than himself through lexicon and/or the meaning or effect of its mechanisms. Having a game based on real life experiences also immediately gives it additional texture and gravitas, as it is also a document/commentary; something that has ties with reality, ties that sadly many games do not have.
Cliff Johnson kickstarted a direct sequel to The Fool's Errand called The Fool and His Money that got released in 2012. I might give it a try at some point... but not before I finish Phantasy Star IV!!
As several other of these Disney/Sega games on Genesis/Megadrive the game is extremely beautiful for a game on that system (there are a lot of nice backgrounds, neat parallax scrollings and almost none of the ugly dithering often used to try and artificially expend the limited palette). Sadly, being on the Sega 16bit also mean you have to deal with its supremely garbage controller. With three buttons in line, A being dash, B being shot and C being jump, you often find yourself trying to press both A and C at the same time, which means an annoying claw grip, or putting your controller on your leg and use the buttons like on an arcade cabinet. The buttons themselves are also a bit dubious, considering how far and how hard you need to press them for it to register, but that's only minor annoyance when compared to the D-Pad. It's mushy nature makes it way harder than it should to hit up or down without getting a little left or right. In Quackshot that means making it extra hard to shoot up or to duck (!), which is needed to slide. In all fairness, the age of the controllers do not help and after switching to a less used controller things were a good deal better, but still far from perfect.
Anyway, not very hard, not very long, not super creative levels, but an enjoyable romp (once the controller is tamed).
I don't know about this specific game but in some games you were able to adjust the a-b-c button setup.
Anyway, I look back fondly on the times where my best friend had the Megadrive and I had the SNES. Man we spent the second half our teenage years playing those things instead of getting laid. Super Shinobi, Golden Axe II (i think it was II), Phantasy Star II, Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusions (this game was really awesome), some RPG with a huge box on the SNES (maybe secret of mana?), Mario Kart, etc etc.
I also had a 1st gen Lynx and he got the Sega (Game Gear?). He had the original GameBoy too of course. Parents were stacked, mine not so much.
He later got a Neo Geo but I didn't really enjoy the games he had on those.
I don't know about this specific game but in some games you were able to adjust the a-b-c button setup.
Anyway, I look back fondly on the times where my best friend had the Megadrive and I had the SNES. Man we spent the second half our teenage years playing those things instead of getting laid. Super Shinobi, Golden Axe II (i think it was II), Phantasy Star II, Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusions (this game was really awesome), some RPG with a huge box on the SNES (maybe secret of mana?), Mario Kart, etc etc.
I also had a 1st gen Lynx and he got the Sega (Game Gear?). He had the original GameBoy too of course. Parents were stacked, mine not so much.
He later got a Neo Geo but I didn't really enjoy the games he had on those.
Now you made me go look at pictures online (traded it in for something else at a real shitty rate. As in, got 15% of what I paid). It was most definitely Secret of Mana with the strategy guide book or whatever. Keep in mind we're talking german versions so they might have come in a different box.
I explicitly remember the three player option but didn't have a multiplayer adapter at the time. Got one for Bomberman later on. Damn I'll have to dig that stuff out and look what else I find. Now with the real TV on my desk I might just end up building that long-wanted shrine.
The Megadrive/Genesis being still plugged in I made a somewhat honest attempt at playing a classic: The Super Shinobi aka The Revenge of Shinobi outside Japan. This is a good looking game by Genesis' standards, the music is competently done by Yuzo Koshiro (known for the terrible dance music of Bare Knuckles aka Street of Rage and the timeless classics in Actraiser and Actraiser 2) and you get treated to some ok shuriken throwing action, but.... BUT... very early in the game, one move proves very important in the gameplay: the double jump.
When about to reach the apex of your jump, you can depress and repress the jump button for your ninja to do a tucked somersault allowing you to gain a little height and a little distance if you so wish (all of the jumps are non-committal). Also, if you attack during the somersault you throw like 8 or 10 shuriken in a 90° arc. Each stage is 2 levels and a boss and in level 2-1 already you have mandatory double-jumps (with failure being punished by death). Same in 2-2. In 3-1 the double jump is needed to switch between the foreground and the background. In 4-2 and 5-1 it's required to navigate the stage. In 5-2 you get foreground/background switching with death pits on a side and hazards on the other... I am not too sure what is going on in the remaining 3 stages because 5-2 is the part where the cartridge almost went flying.
Why? Because the timing for the double jump is a tiny window lost in a gigantic floaty jump. The funny(?) thing is that it feels like the game creators know their mechanism is garbage, because you get a very limited supply of super magical ninja powers and one of them is... jumping higher! That does not help for the background/foreground switching (the jump becomes even floatier so good lucky finding that window!), but it alleviate some of the pain.
It's a bit sad, because the fun of a ninja game should be the movement (be it the nervous wall jumping of Ninja Gaiden, the giant leaps of Ninja Spirit or the sneaking around of Tenchu) and here you spend your time fighting with it. Maybe practice makes perfect, but damn...
PS: As often, The Cutting Room Floor's page for the game is pretty amusing with Rambo, Spiderman, Batman, Godzilla and Sony Chiba going in and out of the game with different revisions (I have a REV00 it seems, so I don't have Spiderman but have all the others!).
The Megadrive/Genesis being still plugged in I made a somewhat honest attempt at playing a classic: The Super Shinobi aka The Revenge of Shinobi outside Japan.
I loved playing that with my friend who owned a Megadrive. There was an unlimited shuriken code you'd enter in the options screen somewhere. We eventually got so good at it that we beat the game with no deaths and without the unlimited shuriken. Yeah there was one point where we needed the super-jump to get past. I want to say it had a junkyard scenery.
Once we perfected it we'd go to the computer store and play through from start to finish, with other kids around us ooooh-ing and aaaah-ing. Then the ending credits rolled and you'd have to press the reset button to start over, or it would endlessly just sit at the ending screen.
The console at the computer store was locked up behind a plexi glass cover.
I have not played anything new on the Retro front (working on Celeste for PS4 and through Earthbound once a week with a buddy of mine), but something funny happened today. I have a friend who wants to buy a hdmi SNES clone and was asking me about some SFC carts I might have. To limit the back and forth I said to him I have close to 400 SFC games, so if it's not super obscure, super rare or super expensive, it's very likely that I have it. So jokingly he asks me about some obscure, rare and expensive game I have never heard about: Majuuou. The gameplay shots don't ring a bell, but that cover art.... I go digging in my cartridges and I have it! I go check the boxes (I store them separately)... and I have it in very good condition with the manual!
I have no idea where or when I bought this game I have never played, but I can tell you I certainly did not pay more than $20 for it (the price I am ok to pay for a boxed SFC game I don't know)... actual worth: around $1000... lol? I guess I'll try the game with my friend
EDIT: Played a bit to be sure the game worked and it does. It's an oddity for sure, but I don't know why someone would pay that much for it.
Wanting to play Sword of Mana the other day gave me a reason to pull out one of my favorite treasures:
I love the GameBoy Micro's sleek, shiny design. The screen is really small, but it's so bright and sharp that it manages to look great.
It makes me happy just to hold this gorgeous bit of dated tech. It's not even the most practical way to play GBA games (The GBA SP has a larger screen and was backwards compatible with GB games), but the Micro is soooooo charming.
In case you're fuzzy on GBA cart size, here's an XBOX 360 controller for comparison's sake:
It took a lot of Thursdays but a friend and I finally beat Earthbound today! There are games that are labeled as cult classics that make you go mmmmmmmh when you play them (because they did not age well or were just not very good in the first place but simply rare, obscure or original in a bad way). With Earthbound it is extremely obvious why the game is labeled that way: it feels like the team brainstormed for two hours everyday about all the odd, funny, zany things they could put in the game and put everything in. Everything. Every step of the (long) way, the game amuses, surprises and befuddles. Maybe it's a silly line of dialogue, a bizarre monster with an absurd ability, a totally weird plot line, an unconventional or gratuitous mechanism, an unexpected turn of events or just moments that make you go WTF.
With all the stuff thrown at the wall, not everything sticks. Some things make you raise an eyebrow or barely get a chuckle out of you, but some others are nothing short of brilliant ideas that could work in other games but probably could not have been thought of in a more conventional environment (the Saturn Valley coffee and Tanda Cave tea come to mind).
The game is not without flaws though. Item management is a tedious nightmare, because you are showered in weird items and yet have very limited inventory space. Comedy also trumps balance in the combat design, so you end up with many abilities, spells and items you almost never use (defense up? attack up? mirror? Food condiments???) while others get in play in almost all fights (slime generator!). Another grievance is that the difficulty curve is also all kind of strange, with phases that become super trivial and others where it becomes very tricky.
Another thing should be added to the credit of the game. I bought a SNES mini to show a friend, who grew up on the C64, the Amiga and the PC, several console classics of the '90s. I played through some of the short action games, we played several hours of Link to the Past and Super Metroid (as well as the Kirby mini gold game!), I was hoping to get him interested in FFIII (as I only played it in japanese and we played through XV together) but nope. He reluctantly agreed to see some Earthbound at the tail end of one of our gaming Thursday and the Goonies-ish beginning and odd tone grabbed him almost immediately. At the end of the next Thursday, he was curious to see more and a few Thursdays later it was clear we would see it through. A long journey that was punctuated by this statement at least once a week: "Ok... maybe that is the best game ever made."
I am not sure it is the best game ever made, but it's one of the most light-hearted and free game there is. It dares everything, because, after all, this is just a video game and we are here to be entertained, so it's not so serious and 'rules' established by other games don't have to be followed. But at the same time, the story is not always so light and the game's madness is controlled, canalized, because the danger of exuberant creativity is ending with a confusing mess that does not respect the time the player puts into it. Entertainment is serious business.
It took a lot of Thursdays but a friend and I finally beat Earthbound today! There are games that are labeled as cult classics that make you go mmmmmmmh when you play them (because they did not age well or were just not very good in the first place but simply rare, obscure or original in a bad way). With Earthbound it is extremely obvious why the game is labeled that way: it feels like the team brainstormed for two hours everyday about all the odd, funny, zany things they could put in the game and put everything in. Everything. Every step of the (long) way, the game amuses, surprises and befuddles. Maybe it's a silly line of dialogue, a bizarre monster with an absurd ability, a totally weird plot line, an unconventional or gratuitous mechanism, an unexpected turn of events or just moments that make you go WTF.
With all the stuff thrown at the wall, not everything sticks. Some things make you raise an eyebrow or barely get a chuckle out of you, but some others are nothing short of brilliant ideas that could work in other games but probably could not have been thought of in a more conventional environment (the Saturn Valley coffee and Tanda Cave tea come to mind).
The game is not without flaws though. Item management is a tedious nightmare, because you are showered in weird items and yet have very limited inventory space. Comedy also trumps balance in the combat design, so you end up with many abilities, spells and items you almost never use (defense up? attack up? mirror? Food condiments???) while others get in play in almost all fights (slime generator!). Another grievance is that the difficulty curve is also all kind of strange, with phases that become super trivial and others where it becomes very tricky.
Another thing should be added to the credit of the game. I bought a SNES mini to show a friend, who grew up on the C64, the Amiga and the PC, several console classics of the '90s. I played through some of the short action games, we played several hours of Link to the Past and Super Metroid (as well as the Kirby mini gold game!), I was hoping to get him interested in FFIII (as I only played it in japanese and we played through XV together) but nope. He reluctantly agreed to see some Earthbound at the tail end of one of our gaming Thursday and the Goonies-ish beginning and odd tone grabbed him almost immediately. At the end of the next Thursday, he was curious to see more and a few Thursdays later it was clear we would see it through. A long journey that was punctuated by this statement at least once a week: "Ok... maybe that is the best game ever made."
I am not sure it is the best game ever made, but it's one of the most light-hearted and free game there is. It dares everything, because, after all, this is just a video game and we are here to be entertained, so it's not so serious and 'rules' established by other games don't have to be followed. But at the same time, the story is not always so light and the game's madness is controlled, canalized, because the danger of exuberant creativity is ending with a confusing mess that does not respect the time the player puts into it. Entertainment is serious business.
I only ever played it through once, but I loved Earthbound. There were a few moments that stuck with me well after I was done with it. I loved the robots, loved the meditation scene, loved the weird shit like the sesame seed on the beach and the walking dungeon guy, and I loved the finale. As far as I'm concerned, every RPG should let you insta-kill enemies you overpower.
The limited inventory space is infuriating, though, especially since there are items meant to be combined with other items (the condiments) and items that need to be repaired that just take up space. I wasn't crazy about the "homesick" mechanic either. Still, it's a great game and I wish Nintendo would have localized Mother 3.
EarthBound is so good! Inventory space is of course huge issue, but the game has other QoL features that make up for it IMO. Stuff like the instant win Noomba mentioned, and the fact that the L button can be used as a confirmation button, allowing you to play with one hand fairly easily.
Buddy gaming Thursday remained retro the last two weeks. As my friend is a big fan of Metal Gear Solid, we played a game neither of us played before: Metal Gear on NES!
Note that I did not say the original Metal Gear, because the NES version is a rushed port of the original that was released on MSX2.
Little side note: The MSX was a format of home computer devised by Microsoft that had a lot of different manufacturers. It was almost non existent in the US, but had limited success in Europe and was very popular in Japan. As a result, it was for a long time the format of choice for japanese game devs and a number of franchises made their debut on MSX. The first MSX standard from 1983 is a bit like a Spectrum as it also was built around a ZX80 chip. The MSX2 standard from 1985 keeps the 8-bit ZX80 chip, but increases ram and boosts the video processor, so it's a bit like a NES+. There are later MSX standards built around 16 bit processors but I believe these were a lot less popular as the competition from other japanese standards (X68000, PC-98, FM Towns) and 16-bit consoles proved too much I guess...
This game is a bit of mixed bag. On one hand there are tons of stuff that will reappear in a form or another in other Metal Gear games (be it starting with a pack of cigarettes, guided missiles, a death tunnel before the last boss, people calling you to abort the missions, etc), and there is a pretty cool sense of progression as you get more and more ranks (more on that later) and equipment, allowing you to explore the enemy base further and further. On the other hand, it's a glitch fest of epic proportion, packed full of silly mechanics, underwhelming boss fights and beating the game without some guide is almost impossible (to be fair, maybe some clues are in the manual, but I have only a loose cart) unless, like it almost happened to us, you accidentally glitch your way to the end (there is a lot of leg work needed to be able to beat the boss that is right before the last boss, but we accidentally glitched past it, killed the last boss and we could have escaped the compound to end the game, but we thought we would have a bad ending - hint: there is only one ending - so we tracked back and then had to do the leg work...).
Some examples of glitches: One of the first item you get is a pair of binoculars. Great! When you equip them , you can flip to the neighbouring screen to see what is in it before entering it! Great to see potential traps or guard placement! What is not great is that when you remove the binoculars, the screen you are in reloads... with all its enemies. OUPS! These problems with loading and unloading screens is a running theme. If you go to the transmitter screen and then back to the game screen, all items respawn. Very neat to farm stuff to the max. If you go to the weapon or equipment screen and back, every script is reset, so bosses and hazards warp back to their starting position (convenient, except when you forget it, change something in your equipment and have a deadly hazard warp back on your face)...
Some examples of silly mechanics: There are card keys in the game. 90% of the doors require a card key to be opened. There are 8 different card keys. You need to have the appropriate card key equipped to open doors... so yeah, you spend your time trying to remember what door uses what key and every new door means going through two menu screens to try each key, one after the other... so much fun... Your max hp and the max capacity of your different types of ammunition and item is based on your rank. You gain rank by freeing hostages. The rank determines also where you respawn after a death. Funny thing though... if you shoot an hostage you lose a rank. My buddy managed to do that mashing to skip text with the fire button... Problem: depending on when it happens, you are shit out of luck, because you don't have access to enough hostages to work your rank back up and getting to the highest rank is critical to be able to clear some part of the game. The NES version also introduce two Zelda like Lost Woods sections (a screen that repeats itself over and over until you find the right pattern). Fun fact: there is no hint anywhere in the game as to how to solve these, so you need to brute force them...
Some examples of underwhelming bosses fights: many of the bosses are static or running a very basic script so almost none of them are dangerous. There is for instance a guy with a fire thrower that does not move and does the same pattern of attack over and over, so you just wait for an oppening, walk up next to him and fill his ear with lead... The most underwhelming boss of all though is
the fact that there is actually no Metal Gear in this version of Metal Gear! The fight against the giant robot-tank is on MSX2, but on NES you just get to put a number of plastic charges on a static and passive super computer...
Some example as to why it is stupidly hard without spoilers:
some key items are only spawned when you call the right person in the right room with a sufficient rank (there are some vague hints about all that but none about where you need to place the calls - all calls are based on what screen you are in). The leg work needed to be able to beat the boss before last has you go through the aforementioned Lost Woods sections and requires to find a number of secret passages that open by punching walls. There is no hint about where the secret passages are and waaaaaay earlier in the game a similar secret passage is introduced, but it is in no way a regular thing.
Despite all these flaws, it made for a decent 10ish hours of entertainment, especially if you are familiar with the more recent games of the serie. The game is not that big and you keep all the stuff you gathered when you die, so running back to where you died is never that painful. Some games of that era are very frustrating to play, but, credit to Metal Gear, despite some rough parts and all its flaws, it's absolutely playable. If you want to play it spoiler free though, I would really advise making a map and writing what key is needed for what door and... well... good luck!
PS: It's my understanding that MGS3: Subsistence on PS2 and the HD remakes of MGS3 have a port of this game's MSX2 version as extra content as well as a version of its MSX2 sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (there is also a NES sequel, Snake's Revenge, but it was made without Kojima's involvement).
